Gunstones Bakery turns up the heat on their materials handling fleet

2/1/2018 12:00:00 AM
by Kathryn Hyde

Gunstones Bakery in Sheffield forms part of the meal solutions division of one of the leading food manufacturers in the UK; 2 Sisters Food Group. Formed in 1993 the group is one of British businesses most compelling success stories of the last 20 years, with customers including each of the nation’s favourite supermarkets.

Briggs Equipment UK have supplied Gunstones Bakery with materials handling equipment for 16 years and work closely with Richard Ironside, logistics support manager, to ensure smooth operation and cost control through the utilisation of Briggs’ unique ‘BE Portal’.

BE Portal provides 24/7 access to the reliable data you need to take key business decisions. It is possible to review the performance of an entire fleet, or even a single forklift truck, with the ability to drill down for additional detail, such as truck up-time, operating costs and servicing records. The ultimate benefit is transparency.

With 22 pieces of equipment on site, including four new Yale forklifts delivered at the end of last year, two Yale pallet stackers, five Yale pallet trucks, a JLG duo lift and three scrubber dryers Richard could have his work cut out keeping an eye on all of the servicing needs and out-of-contract costs of maintaining the fleet without the Portal.

We spoke to Richard about how using BE Portal over the past three years has helped to reduce damage to equipment, rationalise the existing fleet to save on rental costs and reduce downtime through a more efficient breakdown reporting process.

Richard Ironside, logistics support manager, said: “The Briggs team and I use BE Portal to submit and track maintenance requirements as well as monitor efficiency of our fleet.”

“More recently we were able to save money by reducing the size of the fleet and ensuring that the fewer units we had on site were used for more hours.”

“Another example of how we’ve been able to reduce costs with BE Portal was the specific introduction of the ‘location of fleet’ function. This ability to allocate equipment to specific departments means we can drive accountability by department and promote best practice to minimise the out-of-contract maintenance costs.”

“However, the day to day benefit of BE Portal is the ability to log breakdowns quickly and easily so that we have an engineer onsite at the earliest opportunity so our equipment is up and running as soon as possible.”

“Briggs is a great partner and by working together we can ensure that our fleet is managed in an efficient and cost effective manner.”

Briggs’ Customer Contract Manager Zoe Lyons, said: “I have been looking after Gunstones Bakery since May 2016 and BE Portal has shaped the content and driven the direction of my review meetings with Richard. We very quickly recognised that the fleet required ownership and accountability by department and so categorised each fleet number by a specific customer location. I work with Richard to provide a monthly spend report which is exported directly from BE Portal. This gives Richard a breakdown of the out of contract costs, alongside our engineer job sheet and enables him to challenge back to departmental management teams encouraging changes in behaviour as well as identifying operational issues on site.”